Julian Smith’s – 25 Things I Hate About Facebook
Just in case you are still wondering whether you should check out this whole “Social Networking Thing” – too late. It’s way tired. The tides are tiring of Facebook. MySpace has been declared dead. We are now halfway through the Web 2.5 paradigm; there are already so many books at Amazon.com about how to conduct oneself properly on Twitter that they outnumber books on Rocket Science.
In the meantime this whole Creative Commons Lawrence Lessig talked about seems to be finally taking hold. Exhibit A – the meteoric rise in popularity of Flickr.com that arguably saw a spike in numbers due to the fact that bloggers love auto-searching its commercially reuseable photostreams to spice up their otherwise banal output. How about podcasters who don’t make music and who don’t to pay for music? Podsafe sites are sprouting up everywhere – and they work – exposing hundreds if not thousands of indie artists to new audiences. Give it away now, indeed.
Web 1.0 was non-invasive, 1.5 was push, 2.0 – the Superpoke era – totally invasive, 2.5 is condensed and does away with the extra unneeded bells and whistles (be it complex licensing, “Flare” or Superpokes” – which may leave Twitter back at the 2.0 stage) – will 3.0 be customized to you – leaving behind all the trolling through huge atriums of people and their drama and restoring some personal quiet time back to you so you can carry on with… whatever it was you were doing before Status Updates disrupted your life? Well, there is at least A generation that doesn’t remember a time without status updates so this point may be moot.
3.0 will likely understand “you” much more succinctly and endeavor to cater to your needs with micro-precision. It will comprise the evolution of the Tastemaker age. You will type “dinner and a movie” into your search line and it will play concierge to your tastes and preferences – serving up not only menus and addresses and reservations for the restaurants that you love, but potential dates and friends available and compatible to accompany you there.
Marshall McLuhan said “you become what you observe” – and I fear that the more we are catered to, the less we are exposed to unforeseen variables, the more homogeneous and narrow our tastes will become. Nonetheless, I will be happy to do without the time sink of being tossed around in the choppy waves of the collective id-sourced drama. Sure you can tell me it’s my choice, that I can just turn it off and do something else, but I have ideas and works to promote and the old way of doing things holds no water. I mean – post flyers up? Take an ad out in the Weekly?
How do you think Web 3.0 will operate?